PowerSchool Student Information System vs. Salesforce.org Education Cloud

PowerSchool Student Information System is a cool software that can be highly recommended to anyone who is living in the educational management space. It is proven that this software can reduce your manual workload massively if you use it right. Plus it is really worth the price you pay. Especially if you are in the administrative field, this software will help you to minimize manual efforts put into student registrations, staffing recruitment, and main resource management processes.

Incentivized

It is most suited for those within the education industry. For students and staff in particular, the Education Cloud allows seamless connectivity between each person and helps students stay on task. It can be very overwhelming as a student to have so many responsibilities in different areas, so Salesforce does a great job of offering many features that ease this process.

Incentivized

• PowerSchool houses student or staff information that can be easily accessed by those teachers and administrators who need the information. This allows everyone to go to one place to access information.
• Parents can view their child's grades at any time with their protected login on a parent portal. This allows teachers to keep parents informed and involved in their child's progress at school. When everyone works together it increases our students' chance for success.
• PowerSchool offers videos to train new users. When we have new employees, the videos can be accessed at any time the employee needs as opposed to them waiting for someone to help them.

Incentivized

• Great use of integrating across all aspects of enrollment.
• Easy to create tasks for counselors to remember to call prospective students and keep up to date on goals.
• Reporting is fabulous inside of Salesforce.
• All of the Apps in the App Exchange.

Incentivized

• Does not consistently communicate with related software such as Illuminate for Special Education Students.
• Drop down menus frequently refresh as data is entered which slows down the user's ability to enter information.
• Icons are sometimes unclear and not easily understandable. Word labels for some items might be more effective.

Incentivized

• It’s hard to run reports or create working “views” for Enrollment/Student Advisor teams that include both Leads and Contacts in the same report.
• Some fields do not map from Lead to Contact object. When a student transitions from application to acceptance, some dropdown and fill-in fields completely disappear from the student’s page in Salesforce. Every version of Salesforce I’ve used has this problem.
• Salesforce overall is clunky and confusing for the average user. We require thorough Salesforce training for new hires on all teams because it’s not user-friendly or obvious what to click on to achieve a specific task.

Incentivized

We would be starting over at square one if we did not continue our PowerSchool subscription. We do not have a program in a place that would take its place.

Incentivized

Great features, but it can feel very cumbersome at times

Incentivized

It was really so easy to sign up and get going with the whole process

Incentivized

Overall, I have not had to use support for PowerSchool Student Information System because our school district gives us training in each area in which we will be utilizing PowerSchool Student Information System. In terms of in-user support, I feel that there is mild to moderate user support that is built into PowerSchool SIS.

Incentivized

People will respond on time even though Salesforce is such a large organization. This also includes various methods of getting support beyond just calling - they have dedicated reps, chat, chatter, etc that all make the experience more pleasant.

Incentivized

I have heard good things for Infinite Campus and Skyward. I would [evaluate] each of them and see what fits your needs. Each has their strengths and weaknesses and so picking the right one for your needs is important. PowerSchool [Student Information System] does have some great features, but lacks some fundamental reports and functions to make it top notch.

Incentivized

I have not used similar products and I am new to this role. Salesforce has been very easy to learn and I appreciate the support and ability to access the platform when I need to. I was able to easily learn the program and become skilled in what I needed to do. It also made the transition to digital forms quite easy

Incentivized

• It has created shortcuts for all staff members, saving us time.
• In creating shortcuts and combining many different systems into one, it is saving our school money.
• It has created a safety net for teachers because grades and student information is stored electronically, which means teachers not having to worry about losing or misplacing their grade books.

Incentivized

• Positive: Our entire company is more aligned because while still complying with FERPA, the right people have access to student records while also having the correct permissions.
• Positive: we can integrate with our partners who also use Salesforce, while still complying with FERPA.
• Negative: we've needed to hire a Salesforce Development team with multiple people to accurately customize the tool to work for us.

Incentivized